Me and You (and Everyone Else)
I want everything, everywhere, always, to be forever. Nobody is allowed to leave me. Everything is to stay exactly as it is. That way, I’ll always be smiling because I’ll always be happy. Happy to know nothing better and nothing worse. Happy to expect nothing more. Happy to settle with the mediocrities of me and you and everyone else.
But just because Millie and I rubbed genitals, and then just because Ricky and I rubbed genitals, and then just because Millie and Ricky rubbed genitals, and we all watched, doesn’t then mean that we are all best friends forever and ever. Nothing, nowhere, ever is forever. It’s impossible.
The idea of forever is only within reach under delusion. Someone with an advanced degree can write a paper that suggests forever, and that paper can be signed by those in search of forever, but still, this is no sure thing. The people at the 24-Hour Fitness make it seem like we are locked in for life, but then they tell us that if we fall ill or break a bone we can leave without any further financial commitment. If we want out of forever all we have to do is break our own arms.
Today I woke up without a shirt on and the vague recollection of tossing the sweaty garment onto the bathroom floor in the middle of the night. This is the first summer in five years I am lucid. It’s more out of laziness than any genuine effort to be good. It’s showing me how much time there is in a day, in an hour—in a minute! Now I fixate on ways to spend it, ways to avoid its influence.
If I walk to the grocery store rather than drive, I’ll spend an hour total—thirty minutes there, thirty minutes back. If I write an email by hand first, and then again on the computer, it will take twice as long. If I throw away the flowers on the dining room table before they start to smell I can go out and buy new ones—that’s nearly half the day gone if I go during rush hour. As long as I spend time, I’ll never have to worry about wasting it. I envy those who obsess over saving time, rather than spending or wasting, but those people are either disgustingly happy or otherwise raising children. I am neither.
Saving, spending, not wasting—no matter the route, these are all just subversions from the moments when time starts to act on us. We are consumed with acting on time the way we so effortlessly did when we were young. Spending time spending time just to spend time or saving time to save time just to save time. Everything is boiling down to snapshots between and around each other—one spends time while the other saves, the two of them wanting something from time but nothing to do with each other.
If everything was everything for forever, time would not carry this much weight. Things would be slightly different for me. I would be one of those girls who posts dozens of pictures of herself, making the same blasé expression in the same boring, ugly-ironic outfit. Then, at the end of my life, I’d be content, left with hundreds of pictures of myself, making the same face and wearing the same clothes. More fulfilling ways to spend the time would have never crossed my mind. Unfortunately, forever is a curious thing and I am not one of those girls. So instead, time eats me alive if I don’t find something to satiate its passing.
As soon as I stood up this morning none of the blood in my body followed, and I knew I was off to a troubling start. I had to find a job, as I did the day earlier and the day before that, but I hadn’t gotten around to it yet. As I held tight to the bedpost, waiting for my vision to clear, I remembered about seeing ads promoting the Ohio job market. I calculated the odds of me ending up in Ohio. This was about how long it took for the blood to reach my head. I must be dying, I thought. Maybe once Long Beach is underwater, I’ll give Ohio a try.
Something seemed too still about the air in my room. It was so quiet that, for a moment, I thought I had never woken up—that I had died in my sleep or was teetering on the edge in a comatose state in a hospital bed somewhere. I leaned into the space just in front of my nose and listened for the distant beep of a heart monitor. The empty ring in the room was paralyzing.
Then it hit me that this was going to be one of those days where I spent too much time in the in between—where I got stuck on my way to spending time. Where the walk to the grocery store would take three times as long because of the construction on Tanner Boulevard; where the flower shop on Main would be unexpectedly closed due to the neighborhood arsonist. Instead of getting to anything of substance, I would end up walking until the sun fell and my ankles blistered. I would end up back home, in the sticky living room, with the two plastic chairs and the TV on the floor, probably collapsing somewhere onto the crunchy carpet and staring up at the popcorn ceiling while the sounds of Zack heating ramen in the microwave bounced around the kitchen walls, and with my cheek pressed firmly against the floor, I would tell myself—as I do each night—that tomorrow would be the start of it all: I would get the job, find the hobby, meet the soulmate, make the babies, and perhaps, at some point, somewhere in all that, start finding ways to save time and smile and be happy.
After the blood had reached my brain, I felt confident enough to let go of the bedpost. I was pleasantly surprised I didn’t faint. Every year these summers got hotter, and every year Zack said he was going to save some money and buy us an air-conditioner. This summer had been sucking the water out from inside me quicker than I could drink it, and I couldn’t get ahead. Every time I stood, I wanted to faint, and every time I laid down, I could feel my heart pumping out toward my fingertips. There was a vein popping out of my right temple. It hurt when I pressed on it. I could be dying, I thought.
I decided to get dressed today because my pajamas stunk. I chose a semi-transparent sundress with yellow and orange flowers, but it didn’t look right, because my skin was turning gray. In the living room, Zack was ripping a bong while incorrectly appropriating Tai Chi. An annual mandatory virtual CPR class played in the background, his camera off and his mic muted. He is a terrible lifeguard, but it pays our rent. I am lucky he doesn’t mind my leeching off of him.
Actually, I think he likes living with me. He craves the female attention—in love with the chase but never the woman. I’m sure I feed his ego. And if the tradeoff is an occasional conversation about the new protein powder he’s snorting, then living with him is no skin off my back either. He knows I’ll never sleep with him. I’ve never seen him wash his sheets.
“You look feminine,” Zack said when I emerged from my room. I wanted to gag.
“Yeah, thanks,” I responded, crossing my legs, suddenly too aware of my exposed vagina sharing the air seeping out of his nose. He is the worst, but I need him. We just re-signed our lease for another two years. He is the closest I have to forever.
“What are you getting up to Chiquita?” he asked, his eyes closed, his arms and legs wrapped up like snakes on a branch as he unknowingly slipped out of Tai Chi and into yoga.
My head tilted toward him, pounding beneath Earth’s gravitational pressure. I could feel myself slipping away, pouring out from the top of my head into a puddle on the floor, the carpet soaking me up before I knew I was gone. I should be getting the job, but the problem is that I am a writer, and my parents keep sending me money. This means that I have no skills and I hate helping people as well as working for them. I am almost twenty-six, and I spent my twenty-fifth year writing about aimless, ashamed, lonely, sex-deprived (but fiercely independent!) young women. I gave them all different names or sometimes no names at all, and I pretended they were not anything like me. I submitted their stories to various magazines, and no one wanted them, but I grew to love these women nonetheless. I loved them more than anyone I’ve ever known in real life. More than myself, and my parents, and my sister too. Some of them even broke my heart once or twice. I won’t name names. Unfortunately for me, writing fake stories about women who are nothing like me is not a skillset that can be easily applied to laborious pursuits or listed on a resume. This means that I still need to get the job so that I can acquire the hobby, and fall in love with the soulmate, and curate the babies, and start to save time, and smile at everything, and become happy happy happy happy.
Eventually, in response to my silence, Zack popped an eye open, sending me back into the living room, where his nose-breath saturated the air between my thighs. I squirmed out of his line of vision.
“I’m going to buy some cigarettes,” I snapped and made my way to the door. In the hall I could hear him yell something, but I was already too far away.
***
I stopped smoking six months ago. It was the last of my habits to kick, but it will be the first I return to when given the urge to relapse. I took up smoking in high school because I liked the way a black iced coffee and a Marlboro 27 looked at lunchtime. I thought it was cool. I still think it was cool.
Even at a younger age, smoking was always a peculiar fascination of mine. When I was a toddler, my great aunt would take me to the park, and I’d spend the time picking up cigarette butts instead of playing. My older sister would watch me from the top of the slide grimacing, like she couldn’t believe God had given her one of the broken siblings. But even at that age I think I was onto something. I would have been too young to understand it then, but now, in my young adulthood, it is crystal clear. Smoking is an excellent way to spend time.
Although I didn’t have much of an urge to relapse on anything in particular, watching Zack contort his body into gross vertical positions made me realize that returning to smoking would be a worthwhile sacrifice to make in the meantime. I told myself that the job, the hobby, the soulmate, and the children would have to wait, because smoking was going to be an excellent way to spend time.
It took me forty-five minutes to get to the smoke shop because the straps on my flats started digging into my ankles, and I had to stop every five minutes to readjust them. Then the traffic light wasn’t working at the intersection off of Myrtle and Del Prado, so it took me seven minutes to safely cross. The first smoke shop I made it to was closed. Someone had shattered the glass window. There was caution tape carelessly draped over the shards of debris. At the second smoke shop they were out of 27’s, so I bought Turkish Royals and a boring brown lighter. Despite the faltered journey stripping away much of my energy, I remained no less enthused over the ingenious way I had decided to fill the day.
For the next three hours I wandered around Seal Beach chain-smoking cigarettes and tossing the butts into the cracks on the sidewalk. I laughed over how uncoordinated I had become at stomping out the lit end of the cigarette. I used to be good at it—timing the flick of the cigarette with the step of my foot so that the rhythm of my stride could carry on without delay. I was like a toddler all over again, but in reverse. Now I decorated the streets with the little yellow filters. Little yellow filters that would take fourteen years to disappear. If I smoked enough of them, in succession, for long enough, I could leave a trail that would last forever.
***
I threw up on the walk back because I ended up smoking two-thirds of the pack. As I spit into the watery vomit, waiting for more to come, the smell and color of it reminded me of all those yellow filters I left littered on the beach. Soon enough guilt was washing in alongside the waves of nausea, so on the rest of the way back I had to pick up every piece of trash I could find.
As it turned out, I was very good at picking up trash. I found a plastic Target bag to carry it all, and I strategized how to consolidate. I stuffed Kit Kat wrappers into Gatorade bottles and smaller Dorito bags into one larger Tostito bag. I found an oven mitt, which I wore to pick up the needles, and a rubber glove, which I used for anything soggy. By the time I got home the Target bag was filled to the brim, so I went straight to the back to toss it in the dumpster. When I lowered the lid, the dark pink color of the sky in the distance startled me. It was already evening. Night had fallen so effortlessly. I felt I had the trash to thank.
Later that evening I laid on the floor and stared up at the popcorn ceiling and listened to Zack making ramen in the kitchen, just as I anticipated. But the stuck feeling I had predicted from spending too much time in between spending time was not there.
Maybe I should be a garbage man. My eyes scanned the watermark that stretched across our ceiling from the leaky bathtub in Linda’s unit.
Trash lasts almost for forever, I thought.
Maybe tomorrow I will wake up and get a job at the dump, and become a recycling hobbyist, and marry a garbage collector, and make dozens of garbage babies, and live amongst the trash, and save time to save time just to save time, and smile too much, and become disgustingly, disgustingly, disgustingly happy.
Samantha Sewell is a Los Angeles based (UCLA MFA ’22), New York City raised, emerging writer and artist. Her work often explores certain challenges of humanity, with an emphasis on suffering and the self. Currently, she is composing her first book of short fiction, developing a film project under the Alfred P. Sloan Grand Jury Fellowship, and studio assisting for artist, Kathryn Andrews.
Artwork by Frazer Robertson